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Comment by helltone | Hacker News Reader

WebGPU, particularly as a portable way to do compute

100%, was just about to comment this. Combined with WebAssembly, we're going to see a brand new distribution channel emerge to distributing compute intensive apps (especially real-time 3D ones!) in Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox.

Look out Steam, because traditional desktop apps like games and even VR applications will start migrating to the web, because that's where users are. My startup Wonder Interactive is working on exactly this.

https://theimmersiveweb.com/

The metaverse will be born from the open web and emerge as a 3D, immersive internet.

The thing with games is the networking costs are currently to high to stream in a practical sense. I've tried google stadia and xbox cloud play and they are both OK for single player if you can tolerate less than stellar graphics and lag spikes, but completely unusable for any multiplayer. Rubberbanding galore and I am on gigabit fiber. This technology requires telecom infrastructure overhaul to be successful and you can imagine how much inertia will be in place in that industry.

That's not at all my experience, or that of my friends. We play multiplayer games together via streaming (Geforce Now) even though we're in different continents, and it works perfectly fine.

My only gripe is the “open web” part, which is really far from open. We have at most 3 implementations with very unhealthy balance between them.

Especially with the basically impossible to implement from scratch “standard” the web is

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